How 95% of the press/photobook market works

First you buy a very expensive machine. Then you focus on how fast you can run it, how cheaply you can buy your paper, and how quickly you can bind and make covers. You print 4-colour. Above all else you focus on FEEDING THE MACHINE. You sell your product as cheaply as you can - and certainly not just to professional photographers.

You don’t worry too much about colour because your customers don’t expect a lot, and probably think that a bad result is their own fault anyway. From some of the stuff we’ve seen you don’t even worry too much how long your books last or if they fall apart. 

This is NOT how we make our Press Books and Q Books!

We hate to see such amazing technology used to pump out streams of mediocrity. We’ve bought that same very expensive machine, but instead of throughput we’ve set it up to focus on quality, choice and beautiful colour.

We buy the best quality paper available. All our Art books are printed on stocks produced by one of Italy’s oldest paper mills. Their focus, as ours, is on beauty, longevity and sustainability.

We print 6-colour. CMYK doesn’t cut it when your images are heavy with skin tones. Light cyan and magenta are totally needed for high end portrait printing.

We work under a strict colour management regime. We even tweak the colour to give a consistent result no matter which of our stocks you ask us to print on.

We add those extra little product touches that say ‘This is special’. Headbands, ribbons, embossings, packaging. And of course the same beautiful cover materials as our albums.

We can scatter beautiful translucent pages through the book and even print them with images or text.

We know that what our customers are really selling is their images. If those images are in one of our Press Books we want them to look as good as they possibly can.

And of course we have to charge extra, but it’s worth it.

Cheers, Heather